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Crying With Laughter

Crying With Laughter

If you follow me on twitter or read my blog, you’ll know that I have a mental illness. Yes, that’s right. MENTAL ILLNESS. It’s not scary, it’s not dangerous and it sure as hell isn’t catching. But depression can be very debilitating and far too many people are either scared by the term or believe you can just pull yourself together and get on with it. Yet these same people would never dream of telling someone with diabetes to have a fruit pastille and stop making such a fuss.

SANE works to:

Initiate research into causes, treatments and experiences of mental illness

But doing this great work requires money and I have an idea, endorsed by Sane, of how to raise some much needed funds.

A couple of years ago you may remember that Jane Travers raised funds for Medecins Sans Frontieres by asking for 140 character recipes on Twitter. These were collected together into Tweet Treats which was published last year. The book was a great success and greatly helped the charity. Following Jane’s splendid example, I want to produce a book where all proceeds will go to Sane. But I don’t want your recipes: I want you to make me laugh.

Laughter has been shown to greatly enhance mood. This article on psychologytoday.com suggests various way laughter can help people with depression.

I want to put together a book of jokes all sourced from Twitter. Here are the guidelines:

Jokes must not be offensive to those suffering from mental health disorders, racist, sexist… you know what I mean.

Profanity is fine. This isn’t a book of jokes for children. Although childish humour is not only permissible, it’s encouraged!

The joke must be tweeted with the hashtag #tweehee.

Each joke must be no longer than 140 characters. If you need to send it over two tweets because the hashtag pushes the joke over 140 characters, fine.

If more than one person tweets the same joke, I will give the credit to the first one who tweeted it.

As we go on with the project I’ll be having ‘themed’ days where I’ll ask for jokes on a particular topic.